Rights groups call proposed Trump administration rule intrusive, xenophobic and a violation of immigrants' privacy.

Rights groups call proposed Trump administration rule intrusive, xenophobic and a violation of immigrants' privacy.

Rights groups call proposed Trump administration rule intrusive, xenophobic and a violation of immigrants' privacy.

Three U.S. lawmakers active in tech issues introduced a bill on Tuesday that would require social networks like Facebook to allow users to pack up their data and go elsewhere, they said in a statement. From a report: The senators, Republican Josh Hawley and Democrats Mark Warner and Richard Blumenthal, offered the bill at a time when there is growing concern that Facebook, along with Alphabet's Google, have become so powerful that smaller rivals are unable to lure away their users. The bill currently does not have a counterpart in the U.S. House of Representatives, which it will need to become law. The bill would require communications platforms with more than 100 million monthly active members -- Facebook has more than two billion -- to allow its users to easily move, or port, their data to another network, Warner's office said in a statement. Under the bill the companies would be required to maintain an interface to facilitate interoperability. Or users would be allowed to choose another company to manage a user's account settings, content, and online interactions, the statement said.

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It looks like there's an outage at Amazon web services.

British PM puts EU withdrawal bill on hold as UK awaits word from Brussels on possible three-month Brexit delay.

British PM puts EU withdrawal bill on hold as UK awaits word from Brussels on possible three-month Brexit delay.

IBM is disputing the much-vaunted claim that Google has hit a new milestone. From a report: A month ago, news broke that Google had reportedly achieved "quantum supremacy": it had gotten a quantum computer to run a calculation that would take a classical computer an unfeasibly long time. While the calculation itself -- essentially, a very specific technique for outputting random numbers -- is about as useful as the Wright brothers' 12-second first flight, it would be a milestone of similar significance, marking the dawn of an entirely new era of computing. But in a blog post published this week, IBM disputes Google's claim. The task that Google says might take the world's fastest classical supercomputer 10,000 years can actually, says IBM, be done in just days. As John Preskill, the CalTech physicist who coined the term "quantum supremacy," wrote in an article for Quanta magazine, Google specifically chose a very narrow task that a quantum computer would be good at and a classical computer is bad at. "This quantum computation has very little structure, which makes it harder for the classical computer to keep up, but also means that the answer is not very informative," he wrote. Google's research paper hasn't been published, but a draft was leaked online last month. In it, researchers say they got a machine with 53 quantum bits, or qubits, to do the calculation in 200 seconds. They also estimated that it would take the world's most powerful supercomputer, the Summit machine at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, 10,000 years to repeat it with equal "fidelity," or the same level of uncertainty as the inherently uncertain quantum system.

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Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says he has given up his efforts to form a government.

Coastal erosion threatened to topple Denmark's Rubjerg Knude lighthouse - but now it's being moved.

A majority of banks globally may not be economically viable because their returns on equity aren't keeping pace with costs, McKinsey said in its annual review of the industry released Monday. From a report: It urged firms to take steps such as developing technology, farming out operations and bulking up through mergers ahead of a potential economic slowdown. "We believe we're in the late economic cycle and banks need to make bold moves now because they are not in great shape," Kausik Rajgopal, a senior partner at McKinsey, said in an interview. "In the late cycle, nobody can afford to rest on their laurels." The decade since the global financial crisis has seen a wave of innovation in financial services, bringing new competitors from fintech startups to giants like Apple and Alphabet's Google. Banks have pondered whether to compete with, partner with or acquire some of these newcomers. Some established firms have sought to rebrand as technology companies, in part to attract hard-to-get talent. McKinsey, whose clients are some of the biggest corporations in the world, consults on topics ranging from strategy and technology to mergers and acquisitions, outsourcing and stock offerings. In its report, the firm said banks risk "becoming footnotes to history" as new entrants change consumer behavior. Most recent attempts by banks to boost efficiency have been "business-as-usual," it said. Banks allocate just 35% of their information-technology budgets to innovation, while fintechs spend more than 70%, McKinsey said. Combined with regulatory factors lowering the barrier to entry -- like open banking and looser requirements for startups -- the environment is increasingly conducive for newer firms to take share from banks.

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Rejecting reform promises, thousands continue protests for sixth day demanding the government resign and hold election.

Christine Peterson, a long-time futurist who co-founded the nanotech advocacy group the Foresight Institute in 1986 and coined the term "Open Source software" among other things writes: I am currently cited on the home page of the Ethical Source Movement, home of the Ethical Source Definition: "In the twenty years since Christine Peterson first coined the term 'open source', our community has grown astronomically, all the while learning from its successes and failures." While it is pleasant to be cited, some might interpret this as my 100% endorsement, and this would be incorrect. The Definition calls for a code of conduct, which by itself is not a problem. And a sample of such a code that I examined uses plain, seemingly-clear English words such as reasonable, inappropriate, harassment, etc. As always, the devil is in the details, or in this case, the interpretation. Although I am not a coder, and am only peripherally involved with the Open Source community these days, it has come to my attention that guidelines such as these are being used to, for example, suppress discussion of male/female differences. This would be problematic for me to endorse, since as part of my never-ending quest to help people find their life partner, I routinely discuss such topics at length myself (video online now). This raises the broader question of whether speech bans in general are a good idea and serve effectively to advance positive goals, or not. To explore this issue with less emotion, let's make up a fantasy example. Let's say that a rumor arises that people who are genetically able to taste phenylthiocarbamide (PTC) are better at coding. The rumor goes viral. Job seekers with the supposedly favorable status put it on their LinkedIn page and try to send genetic test results to prospective employers, along with their resumes. Those unable to taste PTC try to suppress the rumor, fail, organize protests, and finally resort to speech bans regarding PTC status. People who brag about their tasting status, point out that someone else is a non-taster, or even just try to discuss the topic itself more generally, lose their positions on open source projects and even in some cases their jobs. Do these punished individuals then realize the error of their ways? By no means: they are now martyrs, drift in a more radical direction, and become leaders of PTC taster groups who feel they are victims of reverse discrimination. They form secret online groups in which genetic data must be submitted to join, and they quietly meet in person to show off tasting abilities in blind tests. They bond and form communities which reinforce their superior identity as tasters. Believing that 'tasters are better coders' is now regarded as Secret Banned Knowledge. Statisticians try to point out that even if the claim is true, such a correlation is not usefully predictive since great coders are found among both tasters and non-tasters. They further point out that this means finding good coders requires testing for those skills regardless of PTC status, so what difference does it really make? Meanwhile the general public looks on, notices the speech ban, and decides that if such extreme action must be taken against the Secret Banned Knowledge, that knowledge must be powerful indeed, and true. Perhaps speech bans worked better in the old days, before the internet enabled outcasts to find each other, but in any case they don't seem to work well now, as we see with racist speech bans in Europe. One can even make the case that this heavy-handed way of trying to solve social problems was one factor (among many) that helped elect Trump president. So if speech bans aren't the answer, what is? How do we persuade people to step away from incorrect biased views and treat others better? Sadly, there are no easy answers, just difficult work. We can divide the world needing persuading into two groups: (A) those who can be persuaded with rational discussion, and (B) the others. For group A, we use rational discussion. For group B, we need to look at why they are in such desperate need of identity and community that they latch onto false stories of their superiority. For those with the stomach for it, we can try to copy the success of Daryl Davis, the African-American musician who has converted over two dozen white supremacists away from their old beliefs -- by befriending them. This is how hearts and minds are changed, one by one.

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Boeing hopes to resume 737 MAX flights later this year despite major airlines cancelling service until January-February.

Boeing hopes to resume 737 MAX flights later this year despite major airlines cancelling service until January-February.